Shutting Down America’s Killing Fields

Something’s happening in Central City. This was once New Orleans’s dirty little secret. It’s a whisper of a neighborhood, tucked just a few blocks away from the hoopla of the French Quarter, a corner of the city that for years no one wanted to discuss. Central City went dark for weeks after Hurricane Katrina, and when the streetlights came back on outside the shotgun houses on South Claiborne and Thalia Avenues, what they lit up wasn’t pretty. Deep, rampant poverty, sky-high unemployment, and violence—lots of violence. Terms like “killing fields” were used here without much hyperbole; you can point to the five black, male teenagers gunned down on one bloody night in 2006, and dozens more since, for evidence of that.

That’s why my journey around Central City last Thursday morning felt so odd. Maybe it was the older African-American gentleman up at the crack of dawn, carefully cleaning up strands of green and purple Mardi Gras beads from the previous night’s festivities that were draped on his front porch. Or the new, mixed-income development sprouting just beyond a weathered “Welcome to Central City” sign, a jogger traversing the complex’s front lawn. By all accounts, Central City is still a tough place to work, to raise a family, to be a kid. But, especially if you’re a young black man, it feels a little easier to simply live here, to take a deep breath and know that another breath is coming behind.

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The numbers are beginning to bear this feeling out. Last year New Orleans saw its murder rate plummet by nearly 20 percent, to 155 violent deaths, lower than pre-Katrina days and lower than 2006, when the Big Easy was a shell of its former self, its population emptied by the flood. This drop is important, historic even, but one should not break out the king cake just yet—New Orleans still has among the highest murder rates in the country, eight times the national average.

But something’s definitely happening in this city, and in many others across the country. And it has a lot to do with a group of mayors, who are syncing up with the Obama administration’s new efforts to rally public and philanthropic support for boys and men of color, and saying enough is enough.

The chief executives of 58 cities—led by Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter and New Orleans’s Mitch Landrieu—have banded together in a group called Cities United that kicked off its public campaign in earnest last week after nearly two years of piloting and planning. They have one focused goal: ending gun violence among young African-American men. Homicide is the leading cause of death among African-American teens, and in 2011, more African Americans under the age of 22 were killed by guns on American streets (1,668, according to FBI statistics) than soldiers killed in Afghanistan (469) in that bloody year of war.

The mayors gathered just a couple miles from Central City to plot strategy and proselytize, united by a belief that gun violence is one of the driving challenges of our time, that Congress has stalled for years in making this, and many other pressing urban issues, a priority. If these young lives are going to be saved, they say, the solutions will have to be led by City Hall.

Nutter invoked the horrific death rate in his own city of Philadelphia—along with the civil rights legacy of activism that also arose in part from a wave of violence directed at America’s black youth. “Fifty, 60 years ago, we realized discrimination was an issue because we saw the dogs, the water hoses, the attacks, the lynchings,” he said. “And the American public said, enough was enough: We’re not going to stand for this, we will not tolerate this kind of behavior. And laws changed, behavior changed. But today, black folks get killed every day without a word. It might be on page B13 of the newspaper: ‘16-year-old black male shot and killed, no motive, no data, no information.’ Well, those lives are precious too,” Nutter said. “Americans should again be saying, enough is enough … this is mass murder, just in slow motion.”

To stop the bleeding, Nutter in 2011 began working with Dr. William Bell, president of Casey Family Programs and an expert on at-risk youth, on developing solutions to street violence after groups of young people sparked “flash mob”-style attacks in Philadelphia’s Center City. They found an ally in the National League of Cities, which agreed to house Cities United, and joined up with Landrieu, the New Orleans mayor who was facing his own violence problem. These partners, along with the Open Society Foundations’ Campaign for Black Male Achievement and other allies, developed a 14-step strategy for municipalities in crisis called “ 14 Down and Counting,” referring to the number of black men who are gunned down on America’s streets each day.

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Joshua DuBois was President Obama’s first director of the White House faith-based initiative, and is now an author, teacher, speaker and CEO of Values Partnerships. Cities United covered his travel to its conference in New Orleans. Follow Joshua on Twitter: @JoshuaDuBois.